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I have now got as far as the House of Detention, have I not? After a night passed in the Police Cells I am sent there in the van. You were most attentive and kind. Almost every afternoon, if not actually every afternoon till you go abroad, you took the trouble to drive up to Holloway to see me. You also wrote very sweet and nice letters. But that it was not your father but you who had put me into prison, that from beginning to end you were the responsible person, that it was through you, for you, and by you that I was there, never for one instant dawned upon you. Even the spectacle of me behind the bars of a wooden cage could not quicken that dead unimaginative nature. You had the sympathy and the sentimentality of the spectator of a rather pathetic play[38a]. That you were the true author of the hideous tragedy did not occur to you. I saw that you realised nothing of what you had done. I did not desire to be the one to tell you what your own heart should have told you, what it indeed would have told you if you had not let Hate harden it and make it insensate. Everything must come to one out of one’s own nature. There is no use in telling a person a thing that they don’t feel and can’t understand. If I write to you now as I do it is because your own silence and conduct during my long imprisonment have made it necessary. Besides, as things had turned out, the blow had fallen upon me alone. That was a source of pleasure to me. I was content for many reasons to suffer, though there was always to my eyes, as I watched you, something not a little contemptible in your complete and wilful blindness. I remember your producing with absolute pride a letter you had published in one of the halfpenny newspapers about me. It was a very prudent, temperate, indeed commonplace production. You appealed to the “English sense of fair play,” or something very dreary of that kind, on behalf of “a man who was down.” It was the sort of letter you might have written had a painful charge been brought against some respectable person with whom personally you had been quite unacquainted. But you thought it a wonderful letter. You looked on it as a proof of almost quixotic chivalry. I am aware that you wrote other letters to other newspapers that they did not publish. But then they were simply to say that you hated your father. Nobody cared if you did or not. Hate, you have yet to learn, is, intellectually considered, the Eternal Negation. Considered from the point of view of the emotions it is a form of Atrophy, and kills everything but itself[38b]. To write to the papers to say that one hates someone else is as if one, were to write to the papers to say that one had some secret and shameful malady: the fact that the man you hated was your own father, and that the feeling was thoroughly reciprocated, did not make your Hate noble or fine in any way. If it showed anything it was simply that it was an hereditary disease.我现在讲到拘留所了，是不是？ 在警察局关了一夜后，用车就把我送到那里了。你对我很关心很好。几乎每天下午，如果不是真的每天下午的话，都不辞辛苦地驾着车来荷洛威看我，直到你出国。你还写信来，说些很好听的话。可是，让我进监狱的不是你父亲而是你，此事从头到尾都该你负责，是由你起的事，为了你的缘故，被你所害，我才身陷此地：这一点，你从来就没明白过。甚至是看到我被锁在木制囚笼中，也无法唤醒你那死去的、没有想象力的心性。作为一出颇有点令人伤心的戏剧的观众，你看了同情动情[38a]，但却没想到自己便是这一出骇人听闻的悲剧的真正作者。看得出你一点也没领悟到自己干下了什么事。我不想扮演这个角色，来告诉你本该由你自己的心告诉你的事。的确，你要是没让自己的心因为仇恨而变硬变麻木的话，它是会告诉你的。凡事都得出自一个人自己心性的领悟。要是他感觉不到或理解不了，那跟他说也没用。我之所以这么写信跟你说，如果这有必要的话，那是因为你在我漫长的囚禁期间的行为，你的沉默。而且，事情闹到头，打击全落到我一个人身上。这倒是令我高兴的一件事。有许多理由让我甘心受苦，虽然看你时，你那份被仇恨蒙蔽而彻底的顽梗的麻木，在我眼里总觉得很有些可鄙。记得你曾得意非常地掏出一封你在一家半便士报纸上发表的关于我的信。那是一篇非常四平八稳、不痛不痒，的确是很平庸的文字。你为一个 “被击倒的人”说话，呼吁 “英国人的公平意识”，或者诸如此类无聊的东西。像这种信，如果一个可尊敬的人士惨遭指控，你即使不认识他也可能会写的。可你觉得这封信写得很好，把它看作几乎是堂吉诃德式的骑士精神的证明。我知道你还写了别的信到别的报纸，他们没发表就是。但那时他们只不过说是你恨你父亲罢了。没人管你恨不恨的。仇恨，你还不知道呢，以心智论是永恒的否定，以感情论是萎缩退化的一种形式，它消灭一切，除了自己[38b]。写给报纸说恨某个人，就像写给报纸说自己有什么秘密的、羞于启齿的痼疾似的。你恨的人是自己的父亲，而且完全是相互的仇恨，这无论如何不会使你的仇恨显得高尚或美好。如果说其中显示了什么的话，那就是，这仇恨是个遗传病。
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